Lynn Hunt

Lynn Hunt portrait

Lynn Hunt is one of North America's most respected
historians. Pre-eminent among historians of the French Revolution,
she is also known for her theoretical work in European cultural
studies. Currently the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European
History at UCLA, Lynn Hunt has taught and lectured throughout the
world, and many of her books have been translated into a dozen foreign
languages.

Professor Hunt was educated at Carleton College (B.A. 1967) and
Stanford University (M.A. 1968, Ph.D. 1973.) She held positions
at UC/Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania before moving
to UCLA in 1999. She was also a Visiting Professor in France at
the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes, at Beijing University, and at the
Universities of Utrecht and Amsterdam.

Her publications are numerous and impressive. First, she published
her dissertation titled Revolution and Urban Politics in Provincial
France: Troyes and Reims, 1786-1790 (Stanford University Press,
1978). Then Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution
(UC Press, 1984). Her much acclaimed book The Family Romance
of the French Revolution (UC Press, 1992) injected psychoanalytic
thinking into the history of revolutionary politics, with surprising
results.

Co-authored books titled Telling the Truth about History
(Norton, 1994), The Challenge of the West (Heath and Houghton
Mifflin, 1995), and The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures
(Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001) have allowed Professor Hunt to
expand her range beyond France to the whole of Western civilization.

Edited volumes, such as The New Cultural History
(UC Press, 1989), Eroticism and the Body Politic (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1991), The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity
and the Origins of Modernity (Zone Books, 1993), and Beyond
the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture
(UC Press, 1999) have placed Professor Hunt at the forefront
of cultural studies. She has provided an excellent body of work
that explains the importance of this relatively new field to current
scholarship, not only in history, but also in literary studies,
anthropology, sociology, and economics.

In addition to the fifteen books she has authored, co-authored,
or edited, she is also the author of around sixty articles and book
chapters. While most of these focus on the French Revolution, several
are directly concerned with issues of gender. Her 1989 articles
"Masculin et féminin dans la révolution française"
and "Forum: Beyond Roles, Beyond Spheres: Thinking about Gender
in the Early Republic" (with Linda Kerber) helped bring gender
politics into the heated debate occasioned by the bicentennial of
the French Revolution. Elsewhere she has used the French Revolution
as a springboard to explore human rights, as well as the rights
of women.

Professor Hunt's accomplishments have been recognized by her peers
in numerous ways. Among her many honors, she was given an Honorary
Doctorate Degree from Carleton College and was named a Fellow of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, both in 1991.